V9.1 Re-Baseline

[Owl]

Quickie: If I roll back a few snapshots and then re-baseline to the "present", will my "future" be preserved?

[Froggie]

Originally Posted by Owl

Quickie: If I roll back a few snapshots and then re-baseline to the "present", will my "future" be preserved?

Absolutely not! Re-baselining a system removes all snapshots/history except the place you're re-baselining yourself to (like starting from scratch at a point in the past).

Your PAST (not FUTURE) will be preserved just by rolling back to a previous snapshot. As soon as you do the rollback, a new timeline from that point starts to form... there is NO FUTURE when it comes to Rollback

See this basic drawing for what Rollback does when you Rollback and continue from that point.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17664826/Rollback%20RX.pdf

Hope this helps!

[Owl]

Thanks very much, I feared that was the case. I thought perhaps I could trick it into re-baselining a few snapshots ago so that I ditch a load of history (and disc space) but at the same time give myself some leeway if some recent system changes are later found to cause a problem.

Of any new feature requests, I reckon this ought to be pretty near the top - being able to re-baseline to an existing but previous snapshot ought to be possible to implement, and it would be the perfect way to clear some snapshot space while keeping a little bit of protection against mishaps. V10 I wonder?

Originally Posted by Froggie

there is NO FUTURE when it comes to Rollback

I appreciate what you're saying, but I like to think of it as an "alternative future" - you can always jump to it and then kill off the other branch.

[Owl]

OK, well I found myself with time on my hands this afternoon so I bit the bullet - rolled back to just prior to the recent Win7 SP1 that sucked up what headroom I had left, reset the baseline, then did the Windows Updates (SP1 + updates to SP1!) and locked another snapshot. That should keep things ticking over for good while yet.

Notice I didn't uninstall/defrag/reinstall - couldn't be bothered.

[tubby]

How much "headroom" did Re-baselining buy you? -Just curious!

-For me, it got me nearly 1/3 of my harddrive back (I had not "re-baselined" in over 6 months) -typical family use of a home PC, music, games, photos and such.

tubby

[Owl]

My snapshots were occupying nearly 20 Gig out of a 60G partition - so I've got it all back now and ready to start again!

[tubby]

1/3 ...Not bad!

[bgoodman4]

To protect against mishap why don't you, before you re-baseline, image the drive? If you use Image For Windows you can keep your snaps. Then if everything is OK, and you wish, you can delete the image from the backup drive.

[tubby]

I think I may cry....

[Owl]

Originally Posted by tubby

I think I may cry....

Originally Posted by bgoodman4

To protect against mishap why don't you, before you re-baseline, image the drive? If you use Image For Windows you can keep your snaps. Then if everything is OK, and you wish, you can delete the image from the backup drive.

Yeah, thanks. (if you just take a look what it says under my user name...)

Not to be too harsh and give you the benefit of the doubt, I could indeed image and it would indeed help to protect against mishaps. However, the beauty of RbRX is being able to instantly back-track from the "oops" moments when you accidentally or deliberately click something you later wish you hadn't, or to go back and check whether something that isn't working now was working before and what might have happened to change that. Rebaselining is the only way to clear out your snapshot space and continue your history and convenient time-travel, but being forced to rebaseline to a particular snap and killing everything is a bit heavy-handed. And imaging isn't what you might call a quick process. It would be very nice to be able to say "OK, I am willing to ditch all stored system states prior to snapshot x" and have it rebaseline to x but keep the later history.

I do, of course (or should ), have backups of my data partitions (which are not under the RbRX umbrella so that latest documents don't disappear in a roll-back and need fishing for), and backups of the system partition in case of disc disasters (which RbRX can't mitigate against), although it has to be said if your system partition goes down there are plenty of reasons to start from scratch and rebuild rather than just grab the last backup.